


Lacrymosa

by countessrivers



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Jeremiah's slightly stalkerish tendencies, Jerome appears mostly in this fic in flashbacks or as a corpse, M/M, Obsession, occasional disturbing imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 09:57:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15861330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/countessrivers/pseuds/countessrivers
Summary: "Lie, pretend, hide, change your name, put on a mask, lock yourself away in the centre of a labyrinth - it doesn’t matter. Nobody can run forever. "Jeremiah between 4x18 and 4x20.





	Lacrymosa

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week 13 of the Summer of Gotham event - the prompt was 'Season 4'
> 
> Basically just a character study on Jeremiah, and an exploration of his relationships with Bruce and his brother.
> 
> A quick note on the timeline of this fic: I'm not entirely sure how much time passes between 4x18, 4x19 and 4x20. It's not clear from the Bruce/Jeremiah storyline, and if it's at all referenced in Barbara's or Ed's storylines then I probably missed it because I wasn't paying attention. I like to think there had to have been a considerable amount of time, for them to actually build all the generators, for Jeremiah to set his plan in motion, for Jerome to have been properly buried, gravestone and all, and for Bruce and Jeremiah to have gotten close. This fic is me filling in that gap.
> 
> But who knows, time seems to work differently in Gotham. (Like, what year is it supposed to be? I'm seriously asking.)
> 
> Also a major thank you to light of my life dashokeypokey/Killer_Rabbit_of_Caerbannog, who kindly beta'd this after I sent it through to her this morning.
> 
> And yes, that is an Evanescence song as a title, because I can, and I am absolutely that bitch.

Sometimes Jeremiah thinks about names. The power of them.

He spent years hiding behind the name Xander Wilde, building a life, hidden as it was. He always knew Jerome was coming. Knew it, dreaded it, anticipated it with an awful, confusing feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Xander Wilde is a genius. Tragically orphaned in circumstances that no one was really sure about, he flew ahead of his classmates at St Ignatius, graduating early and continuing into a meteoric career as one of the best engineers in the city, if not the country.

Jeremiah Valeska is also an orphan. At least, he is now. A mother and father murdered by their son. Another father who never existed in the first place.

A dead uncle and a dead brother too.

He loved and hated them all, and he’s not sure what he’s supposed to feel now that they’re gone.

He offers up his real name to Gordon and Bullock because there’s a part of him that has yearned to do so for years. To have someone speak the name given to him by his mother. A name that so few people these days even knew. Ecco, despite knowing his birth name, had only ever called him Xander. He had told her to, to better avoid slips, to better pretend he was truly someone other than the bastard son of a snake dancer, but still, he misses it. He misses his name, the shape and sound of it in people’s mouths. He misses being himself, whoever that was, he’s not so sure anymore, the same way he misses his family.

Viciously and violently and painfully, in a way that leaves him feeling bruised and bleeding and half-mad.

Lie, pretend, hide, change your name, put on a mask, lock yourself away in the centre of a labyrinth - it doesn’t matter. Nobody can run forever.

*

Jeremiah comes to slumped on the floor. It takes him far too long to remember where he is, what happened, but the moment he does, he bolts upright, head spinning.

The package waiting on his desk, seeing the Wayne Enterprises tag and thinking of Bruce.

Choking, unable to breathe as the jack-in-the-box exploded, coating his mouth and throat and lungs with that suffocating gas.

His brother’s voice, in his ear, in his head, all around him.

Laughing. Laughing until he cried. Until he blacked out.

Wanting to be alone, he had told Ecco to stay at her apartment the night before, so there’s no one there when he wakes up.

Better, he thinks. Better that no one saw him like that.

Better that no one can see him now, because Jeremiah catches sight of his hands and almost screams. It’s as if his hands have been leeched of all colour. They’re white, unnaturally so, and when he rolls up his sleeves his arms look the same. He scratches at his arm, claws at the skin until he bleeds, and he bleeds red but his arm remains white.

He pulls himself to his feet, trying to remember where he dropped his phone last night. He needs Ecco. He needs her here.

She picks up on the third ring, and Jeremiah interrupts before she can ask what he wants. He doesn’t tell her what happened, he can’t do that over the phone, just tells her that he needs her, immediately. Jeremiah can hear the concern and worry in her voice, but she doesn’t ask any questions, just promises that she’s on her way.

After hanging up, he rushes to the bathroom, just making it to the toilet before his stomach revolts. He vomits twice before nothing but bile starts coming up, and he shakes as the chill of the tiled floor sinks into his skin.

When he finally feels settled enough to stand, he washes his mouth out, and braves a look in the mirror.

It takes him long moments to register exactly what he’s seeing. It’s him, he still looks enough like himself, but if it wasn’t for the bright shock of his hair, the red of his lips, he’d swear he’d gone colour blind. The white of his face matches the white of his hands. He’s not just pale, he looks bleached, unnaturally washed out. Pulling loose his tie and peering down his shirt he can see the same. He shuts his eyes, unable to bear checking anywhere else. He already knows what he’ll find. When he opens them again, he notices his eyes too are washed out. Physically, his eyesight seems perfect, and he can see better than he has in years, but his eyes, like the rest of him, are changed. They’re unnatural, borderline creepy in their colouring.

“To think I used to be the handsome one.” Isn’t that what Jerome had said, that first moment together after so many years apart?

He finds himself laughing before he can stop himself. Nowhere near as bad as the night before, but he still clamps a hand over his mouth, sick to the stomach once again at the sound.

He flees the bathroom, flees his reflection, and all he can think as he stumbles back to his office is what have you done to me Jerome? What have you done to me?

He’s sitting, still as a statue, curled up on the couch, staring out at nothing when Ecco bursts in. She freezes when she sees him, mouth dropping open in shock. He glances over at her, but he cannot bring himself to say anything. His throat still aches, and it hurts to even swallow.

“Jeremiah?” she whispers, dropping to her knees in front of him.

Ecco reaches over and takes a hand in hers, examining it closely as she turns it back and forth. She lightly scratches the palm of his hand with a nail, but the colour, or rather, the lack of it, doesn’t budge.

“What happened?”

He nods towards the remains of Jerome’s gift. He hasn’t been able to bring himself to touch it.

“Jerome,” he says. “He left it for me. When I opened it last night, it exploded, and it hit me with some kind of gas. There was a recording with it, from him. He said he had had it made especially for me. I couldn’t, I couldn’t breathe, I just kept laughing until I passed out. I only just woke up.”

“It’s like this all over?” she asks.

“My hands, face, down my chest. I haven’t… I haven’t checked everywhere yet. I wasn’t-”

He’s interrupted by the ringing of his phone. They both freeze, startled by the sudden noise. Jeremiah looks at Ecco for a moment, indecisive, before standing up and carefully reaching over to pick his phone up from where he’d tossed it on the table earlier.

As he picks it up, he checks the Caller ID. It’s listed as an unknown cell phone number, so he’s wary when he hits ‘accept’. Part of him expects, dreads, to hear his brother’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Hello?” he says.

“Mr. Valeska, it’s Bruce Wayne.”

That was not who Jeremiah had been expecting.

“Mr. Wayne,” He can practically hear Ecco’s eyebrows shooting up. “Uh, what can I do for you?”

“Please, um, you can call me Bruce, if you like.” He sounds to Jeremiah almost awkward, uncomfortable. “And I apologise. I know it’s quite early, and things must be hard for you right now, no doubt you have a lot on your plate. I was just, I was wondering if we might be able meet again? To discuss the grant and getting the generator project up and running.”

Jeremiah is taken aback. Part of him had thought he had dreamed that. Had dreamed Bruce Wayne’s interest, his admiration. Had dreamed the out-of-the-blue offer of what would no doubt be a sizeable research grant.

“I’m sorry Bruce,” he says, testing the name out on his tongue, and finding he likes it. “It’s only, when you mentioned the grant, I figured I’d be given some resources and maybe a warehouse somewhere with a few assistants. I figured I’d be dealing with someone in your R&D decision. Not, well, you.”

“I’m the one who offered it. And in general, I try to stay well-informed, if not heavily involved, in any major projects or investments the company makes. Certain decisions, certain approvals made by the board in the past have been… poorly considered.” Jeremiah wonders if Bruce is speaking about Arkham, or Indian Hill, or WellZyn, or any number of the rumours whispered about the company that, directly or indirectly, employs a good portion of the city.

“Besides,” Bruce continues. “This project could change Gotham for the better. Of course I want to be a part of it.”

“That’s kind of you to say.”

“Would tomorrow work for you?” Bruce asks. “We could go to the office, go over the preliminary setup and paperwork? Get your security clearance and ID access sorted while we’re there too.”

He finds himself agreeing before he can even think about it.

“Tomorrow sounds perfect Bruce.” Ecco shoots him an incredulous look, but he continues anyway. “You’re right, why not get started right away?”

“Excellent,” Bruce sounds a little more relaxed at his agreement. “I can pick you up, drive you into the office.”

“You don’t need to go out of your way. I’m happy to-”

“No, it’s no problem,” Bruce cuts in. “I am more than happy to do so.”

“If you’re sure? I don’t want to be any trouble.”

“Nope, no trouble. Honestly.”

“Alright,” Jeremiah says hesitantly. “If you’re sure. Would 10:00am work?”

“10:00am? Yes, perfect, I will see you then.” Bruce sounds impossibly pleased at having gotten him to agree to not only the meeting, but to picking him up, and Jeremiah is in no state to puzzle out why that may be.

He keeps the phone to his ear for a few moments after Bruce ends the call, listening to the silence, before lowering it gently back to the table. He doesn’t know why he did that. Why he agreed to meet with Bruce when he should be dealing with whatever this is. Only that he very much wants to see him again. He rests both of his palms down on the table, and stares down at his hands. He’d never been all that tan to begin with, the result of his Irish roots and having lived underground for a good portion of his life, but the unnatural white of his skin almost glows in the room’s dim lighting. He looks like a ghost.

Maybe he is a ghost. Maybe Jerome had killed him, and this pale shade is all that is left.

“Bruce will be here tomorrow,” he says, shakily breaking the quiet. “I’ll need… I’ll need make-up, something that won’t smudge or move, to cover this up. Contacts too.”

“Will they need to be prescription?” Ecco asks.

Jeremiah almost laughs, can feel it building in his throat, itching to get out, because isn’t that just funny, in the most awful, morbid way possible.

“No,” he pushes out. “No, my eyesight is better than it’s ever been. Just, something to mask the colour.”

Jerome had drugged him, gassed him, infected him, done god knows what to him, but hey, he no longer needs glasses.

“Whatever you need,” Ecco says, though Jeremiah can still hear the confusion in her voice.

“It’s not just for him,” he insists, rationalising. “The police are bound to want a statement about yesterday, and I can’t… I can’t let them see this. Can’t let anyone see. Who knows what they’ll do.”

He hears her make a vaguely agreeing noise behind him.

“While you’re gone, I’ll take the blood sample as well.”

“Alright,” Ecco says. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He feels her brush a hand gently across his shoulder, and he’s hit by a strangely muted wave of thankfulness for her. For her devotion, her loyalty, her resolve to stay with him despite all of this. No one else has ever stood by him, and he clings to the feeling that knowledge invokes in him. He waits until he can hear the clacking of her shoes on the floor retreat before he stumbles away from the table, sinking down and clutching his knees to his chest.

He can see the security monitors from his position on the floor, and it’s only after Ecco has left, after Jeremiah has seen her drive out of the security camera’s range, that it fully occurs to him that he really should have told Bruce. Should have, but hadn’t. Hadn’t told Bruce about his brother’s “gift”, and the Wayne Enterprises label that was attached. Hadn’t told him about Jerome’s taunt, Jerome’s threat, Jerome’s promise. Hadn’t told him about how, before passing out from exhaustion, Jeremiah had spent hours laughing hysterically, hands clamped over his mouth in an attempt to muffle the sound, and cheeks damp from the tears he couldn’t contain either.

Hadn’t told him about how, while his head was still pounding, and his throat was raw, Jeremiah hadn’t felt this aware in years. 

*

Jeremiah doesn’t believe in anything as romantic and clichéd as ‘love at first sight’. Still, the first time he lays eyes on Bruce Wayne in person, he feels a tug, a flutter in his chest that he cannot explain.

The first time he sees Bruce outside of the papers, the magazines. The crime scene shots of Bruce, hands stained in his parents’ blood, being escorted out of a Gotham alley by his butler; mouth stained and face paint flaking off his skin, being escorted from the Gotham circus by the same. Snippets of news footage of a brave, terrified boy with a knife to his throat (his brother’s knife). The little photo that Thomas Wayne showed him in their meeting of his wife and child.

Jeremiah had seen the live news footage, had seen Jerome make his demands, and so he was not surprised to find James Gordon at his door shortly thereafter. He had expected it. Had even partly expected the suggestion that he be traded to his brother in exchange for the mayor and a square full of hostages.

What he hadn’t expected, was Bruce Wayne. Given Gordon’s reaction to the mere suggestion of Jerome getting his hands on the young man, Jeremiah had been surprised he had come along. That Bruce had been on board with the ridiculous plan to allow them both to be led to Jerome like lambs to the slaughter, whatever failsafes and guarantees were being promised, had seemed insane to him. Jeremiah had had no desire to give Jerome the opportunity to act out whatever bloody revenge fantasy he’d spent years cooking up, much less do it in front of an audience. He didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

The idea of Jerome killing Bruce hadn’t sat well with Jeremiah either. Although, for all intents and purposes, he was a stranger, Bruce was innocent, having committed no crime other than being stubborn and interesting enough to catch Jerome’s attention. Jeremiah had been on the receiving end of Jerome’s unique brand of obsession (love) his entire life. It was not something he would wish on anyone.

Still, Bruce had reached out his hand, unfailingly polite, and introduced himself, giving no indication that he was uncomfortable in the presence of someone so like the man who had terrorised him time and time again.

It had been obvious to Jeremiah that Bruce was trying to manipulate him into agreeing to the plan, and while a part of him resented that, behind the façade Jeremiah had seen real understanding, a real appreciation for his work. But more than that, he had seen that Bruce had belief, true conviction in what he was saying – that the risk was worth it, that standing up to Jerome, together, showing him that the people of Gotham would not be threatened or cowed, even if it killed them, was the right thing to do.

Jeremiah could maybe see why James Gordon was so willing to lay down over the wire for Bruce Wayne. Why Lucius Fox went to such pains to reassure that they would be safe from Jerome’s itchy trigger finger. Why Jerome had demanded him in the first place.

*

“That…is a nice car.”

Jeremiah had decided to meet Bruce outside. He’s dressed and ready and waiting just outside the bunker entrance when Bruce pulls up in what can only be described as a truly magnificent car.

“Isn’t it? It was a birthday present, actually. From Alfred.”

“Heck of a present.”

Bruce looks almost fondly at the car, before turning his gaze over to Jeremiah. The look Bruce gives him can’t exactly be called a once-over, but it’s pretty close.

His skin had taken the make-up Ecco had brought back easily and combined with the setting sprays she had also purchased, Jeremiah is confident it will last the day. His hands look fine as well, but they’re more likely to smudge, so he has a pair of gloves in the pocket of his coat just in case. The cold snap currently hitting Gotham is a blessing in disguise. The contacts had been a pain to put in, given that he’s never had a reason to wear them before, but he got there eventually, and he’s also wearing a pair of non-prescription glasses that Ecco had managed to find.

He’s confident that his disguise is passable, and he should appear to Bruce exactly has he did two days ago. There’s nothing that should make him suspicious, make him think that there’s anything out of the ordinary here.

“Thank you again for agreeing to meet so soon,” Bruce says, breaking the silence.

“No problem. It gets me out of the house I suppose, which I guess I can do more of now.” Jeremiah gestures towards the car. “Should we?”

Bruce nods, and holds the passenger side door open for him. Jeremiah refuses to let himself be charmed in any way.

Bruce drives, well he drives like one would expect an eighteen-year-old with a car like this to drive. He’s not reckless, he pays attention to the road, and he stops at all the red lights, but he is clearly enjoying himself, and he weaves in and out of traffic, slipping into and through gaps tight enough to make Jeremiah tense, with a confidence that borders on daring.

He also drives fast. Faster than Jeremiah is entirely comfortable with.

Which is why, sooner than they should be, they’re pulling into the parking garage underneath Wayne Plaza, sliding into the reserved spot right by the building entrance.

Before they get into the elevator that will take them up into the building proper, Bruce leads him over to the security office, signing him in as a visitor. He’s handed a temporary ID card; which Bruce explains is just for today until they get his proper access sort. After that they head up to the ground floor.

When Jeremiah walks into the lobby of the building, he stops short, ignoring the people moving around him and just standing there. Pictures, sketches, images cannot do justice to the feeling of standing in the middle of something he has created. Bruce is walking ahead of him, seemingly oblivious to Jeremiah’s pause, and he has to rush to catch up, but as they make their way to the elevator, through the corridors and into Bruce’s office on the top floor, he can’t help but stare. He’s helped design and build dozens of buildings since finishing college; in Gotham, across the bay in Metropolis, and even in cities further afield, but Wayne Plaza will always be his favourite. He would wager he knows more about this building than anyone, even Bruce, and part of him regrets that this is the first time he’s seeing it in person.

They get to work almost straight away, and it goes as smoothly as Jeremiah could have ever hoped. Bruce doesn’t force conversation, he doesn’t pester Jeremiah with questions, he simply listens, taking methodical notes and only jumping in when he needs something clarified, as Jeremiah explains how the generators work, how many they would hypothetically need to power the entire city, and what would be needed to make that happen.

He fills out form after form, hesitating only the first time when Bruce asks him what name he would prefer using. Without really thinking, he chooses Valeska, and so that is the name that appears on his ID card and the official paperwork that Bruce slips into his draw.

The only issue that arises happens when they’re setting up the funding account. Jeremiah has an almost irrational desire to keep the entire project, everything they’re doing here, to himself. He wants, no needs, to keep it secret. Maybe it’s paranoia, or maybe just a side effect of living away from the world, isolated for so long. When he expresses that to Bruce, Bruce just looks at him sympathetically.

“Of course,” he says. “I want you to feel comfortable. The full details don’t need to leave this room if you don’t want them too.”

“Thank you. It means a lot that you would trust me with this.”

The smile that Bruce offers up feels like electricity shooting up his spine.

They continue working, bouncing ideas and suggestions off each other easily until they notice that it is well past midday and they’re both actually starving. Bruce calls to have a late lunch brought up to the office, and the young woman who brings the cart in eyes Jeremiah warily, but she smiles genuinely at Bruce, who smiles back and thanks her as she leaves.

They eat in companionable silence. Jeremiah feels comfortable with Bruce in a way he doesn’t think he has ever felt with anyone other than Ecco.

(He doesn’t count those early years with Jerome. When they were all each other had. That handful of years before his mother got worse. Before it all got worse. Before he ruined it all).

Picking at the tomatoes in his salad, Jeremiah casts his eyes around the room, spotting a framed photograph of Bruce and his father.

“I was so grateful for him coming out to see me,” he says, out of the blue, breaking the silence. He nods towards the photo. “Your father,” he continues, in answer to Bruce’s questioning eyebrows.

He had been. To help design and build the new Wayne Enterprises international headquarters had been a once in a lifetime opportunity to leave his mark on Gotham in a monumental way, even if no one would ever truly know he had done it. Having Thomas Wayne, the CEO himself praise the design had been one thing, but for the man to insist on seeing him in person, and actually going out of his way to accommodate his… eccentricities, had been something else. Something Jeremiah remembers even now.

“He clearly thought highly of your work. I’m sure he didn’t consider it an inconvenience,” Bruce says.

“You know, that’s almost exactly what he said.”

“What was he like?” Bruce asks, almost hesitantly, after a long moment.

“I would think you would know him better than me.”

“He was my father,” Bruce says as he looks over the photo on his desk. “I knew him as my father. I know how Alfred saw him, how Lucius saw him, how half the city saw him. But you knew him differently again.”

“He was a good man,” Jeremiah says. “I only met him the once, communicated with him another handful of times, but I could tell that much. He cared. About his company. About the city.” He hesitates for a moment, before continuing. “He showed me a photo during that meeting. Of you, and your mother.” Bruce, who had been listening with the smallest of smiles on his face, snaps his head back towards him. “The way he talked about you. He loved you, thought the world of you. He couldn’t stop talking about how bright you were, how at eleven years old you were probably smarter than him and your mother put together.” Jeremiah laughs a little. “He said we’d probably get along.”

He remembers being envious of the Waynes in that moment. Of how happy they had looked in the photo, of how much Thomas clearly adored his wife and son. How proud he had been, speaking of Bruce and his accomplishments. He doesn’t resent Bruce though. Didn’t then either. It was hardly his fault he had been born with something Jeremiah wasn’t.

Besides, they’re both orphans now anyway.

*

They meet up regularly, every few days for at least a couple of hours. Bruce shows him the lab and storage space he’s had set up, tucked away in one of Wayne Tech’s many facilities. The security is heavy, but discreet, and only they have full access to the building.

Once the parts start coming in, most of Jeremiah’s time is spent back at the bunker, where he and Bruce personally work on the prototype generator. Bruce is a quick learner, and he takes in everything Jeremiah teaches him with ease, so Jeremiah is more than happy to entrust some of even the most delicate work to him. It’s actually nice to have a second set of hands around, and not just for the companionship. Ecco had never really been that interested in this side of his work, and things do go much faster with the assistance.

Incomplete sections of the other generators are put together by the small team Bruce hand-picked, and stored at the facility for full assembly later, once Jeremiah is happy with the finished prototype. Whenever they visit, Jeremiah checks over their work, ensuring everything is as it should be, but for now, he’s happy to leave at least that much to others. He’ll just make sure he’s the one put them all together at the end.

Bruce and Jeremiah work well together, regardless of where they are, and whether they’re working in easy silence, or chatting about whatever topic they’ve become fixated on. Jeremiah gets the sense that Bruce doesn’t open up easily, so he goes out of his way to try and make him feel comfortable, offering up his own stories and secrets in exchange for Bruce’s.

What becomes clear very quickly is that Bruce thinks himself in love with Selina Kyle. He has yet to meet the girl, but he can already say that he’s not particularly fond of her. He couldn’t say why, having never met her, and only knowing her from Bruce’s stories, which, on the surface, seem positively glowing, but all the same, there is something about her that just rubs Jeremiah the wrong way.

It may be the way she has apparently spent years toying with Bruce’s affections. Stepping forward, drawing Bruce in, only to swiftly back off every time. Closing herself off from attachment, running before she is the one left behind. Which, on an impartial level, as a defence mechanism, Jeremiah can completely understand. But Bruce is his friend, and every time Selina pulls away or shuts him down, it’s Bruce who gets hurt. Which, in turn, bothers Jeremiah. Bruce can’t even tell him if they’re actually dating or not.

Hearing that she associates with people who have tried to kill Bruce in the past hadn’t done much to endear her to him either.

Jeremiah is sorely tempted to just come out and tell Bruce that if Miss Kyle insists on being fickle and choosing criminals who have hurt him on multiple occasions over him, then he should just end it, and find someone who wants to be with him, and can actually admit it.

Bruce is still stupidly smitten though, so Jeremiah bites his tongue.

*

Jerome is a fraught, but regularly occurring topic of conversation between them. It starts with Bruce asking about St Ignatius, and from there, questions about his degree, his work, his life both within and outside the circus. It’s something like a release to be able to talk to someone about Jerome, and Bruce is probably the only person with whom Jeremiah could have such a conversation.

“I would have saved him,” Bruce confesses one night. They had started out talking over the latest round of permits for the installation of the generators, but after about an hour they had gotten off topic.

It’s clear from Bruce’s tone that he feels guilty. His incredible ability to force the weight of the world’s problems onto his own shoulders still manages to amaze Jeremiah. Still, he doesn’t blame Bruce for not somehow saving Jerome. He doesn’t blame Jim Gordon for firing the bullets. He doesn’t even blame Jerome for climbing up onto that roof in the first place and then letting go. Jeremiah may love and hate his twin in equal measure, but he knows that much. Jerome’s dead and it’s no one’s fault, not really. At least, it’s no one’s fault this time.

The night Jerome had taken the children’s fundraiser hostage, as he was making his demands to James Gordon on live television, Jeremiah had been, for the first time in three days, asleep. Ever since the Arkham breakout, he hadn’t felt safe enough to even close his eyes. Despite there being no evidence that Jerome had been looking for him at that point, despite the clear indication that he had had other things to do, Jeremiah hadn’t been able to shake the paranoia, terrified that his brother would find him. Each time he had shown up on the news, after those men were tossed off the top of the Gazette, after the attack on the school bus, after the massacre at the police station, the feeling had just grown worse. It was only after the exhaustion caught up to him, helped along, he suspects, by something slipped into his drink by a concerned Ecco, that Jeremiah finally passed out into dreamless oblivion, slumped uncomfortably over his desk.

The peace hadn’t lasted long, as all too soon, Ecco had been shaking him awake, the television already switched to the right channel, with the news station replaying Jerome’s ransom call over and over, intercut with the occasional update from the ground reporter on what was happening inside the building. Neck and back aching from his ill-placed nap, Jeremiah hadn’t been able to look away.

The unfamiliarity of it all had been the most alarming thing, because this had not been a Jerome that Jeremiah had recognised. The violence was still there, the sadistic nature and the need for attention, but it was now on a scale that was wholly new. Jerome had always been vicious, particularly when provoked, and he returned any slight or threat ten-fold, but there had been limits. The half-joking threats of a child and cake-knives to throats and sloppy, frenzied murders of abusive mothers were very different to setting a bus full of cheerleaders on fire and shooting the deputy mayor in a room full of spectators. And Jeremiah understood that in many ways, for Jerome it had simply been about understanding. Understanding how something worked, understanding how someone might react, understanding what made them tick, understanding how far he could push them. Granted Jerome would often choose to simply crack whatever it was open, either figuratively, or literally, in order to see how it worked, but still, this had just been chaos and death for its own sake. Something had changed, and it had slowly dawned on Jeremiah that he no longer knew what to expect from his brother.

‘You were right to run away,’ that little voice in Jeremiah’s head had whispered. ‘Just look at what he’s done.’ Jeremiah agreed. He had to agree.

Was Jerome simply just letting go, embracing his nature and twisted wants? Had killing their mother set him off? Had Arkham done it? Had he done it?

Or was it whoever it was pulling the strings?

Because even underneath the fear, Jeremiah had recognised that there had been something else going on. As he watched his brother taunt the police, Jeremiah had realised that someone had purposefully set Jerome loose on Gotham. To what end hadn’t been clear at the time.

After the fourth replay of the footage, and no new news apart from the occasional interview with someone who had managed to get out before the doors were sealed, Jeremiah had started pacing, worrying at his cuticles absentmindedly and trying to think of anything but the gnawing dread sitting in his stomach. A drink had done little to calm his nerves.

Less than ten minutes later, Jeremiah had been shaking as Ecco hovered anxiously, struggling to breathe through a sharp spasm in his throat and what felt like a mouth full of blood. The feeling had passed quickly enough, disappearing into nothing, but it had shaken Jeremiah to his bones, and driven him to his knees as he emptied his stomach into the trashcan beside his desk.

As he regained his breath after vomiting up what little was left in his stomach, and washed the phantom taste of blood out of his mouth with the glass of water provided by a worried Ecco, Jeremiah had, very purposefully, not looked at the time. Nor, later, did he make note of when exactly Theo Galavan had plunged a knife into his brother’s neck.

He sometimes wonders what would have happened if he had ever crossed paths with Galavan. What he would have done or said to the man who had broken his brother out of Arkham, used him, and then killed him.

(Only after it was all over would Jeremiah find out Bruce was there. From the shaky camera footage provided by one of the hostages trapped inside, he’d watch as his brother demanded Bruce offer himself up. Watch as Bruce ran towards his guardian, only for Jerome to drag him away. Watch as Jerome placed Bruce, knife to his throat, between himself and the guns pointed at him. Watch Bruce rush from the stage as Jerome lay on the ground, choking on his own blood, his murderer crouched over him.)

Bruce never asks him how he feels about his brother’s death, and Jeremiah is grateful for that. He has a feeling Bruce understands well enough anyway. Jeremiah has seen the scars, faded though they are. The pale line on his neck. The marks on his wrist and up his arm. Jerome had never been comfortable leaving something clean and untouched. He always had to pick and scratch and take apart.

Jeremiah knew about the extent of his brother’s obsession, had seen the way Jerome had looked at Bruce.

He’d seen the way Bruce looked back.

*

After the death of the GCPD snipers, Jerome’s groupies had converged on them quickly. For a moment Jeremiah had thought about putting up a fight, on principle, but the gun jammed into his ribs put paid to that quickly. To his right, Bruce had been similarly manhandled forward, although the groupies had eyed Bruce with a peculiar wariness that raised questions of its own.

“My thanks for dropping the kids off, Jimbo,” Jerome had shouted from the stage. Jeremiah had twisted his head around to catch a glimpse of Gordon, and had felt the helpless rage pouring off the police captain as he stood at the back of the crowd. He’d lost sight of Gordon quickly as he’d been dragged closer to the stage, the terrified crowd parting for them silently.

Jeremiah had been dragged up one set of stairs, Bruce the other, and all too soon he had been back within striking distance of Jerome. Joy was too nice a word to describe whatever it was that Jeremiah had sensed from his brother. Manic, destructive glee was perhaps the more appropriate term. Jerome had grinned at him briefly, a hungry sort of delight passing across his face, before he had turned his attention towards Bruce.

“Regretting not letting my uncle and his goons murder me yet, Brucie?” Jerome had asked as he slung his arms around Bruce’s neck to clip the collar into place.

“No,” Bruce had replied firmly. He hadn’t looked away from Jerome, gaze frank and daring as he angled his head up to give Jerome space. “I meant what I said. You didn’t deserve that. No one does. You need to be in Arkham, where you can get help.”

Jerome had just laughed.

“Christ, you’re precious.”

A beep had signalled the activation of the collar, but Jerome hadn’t pulled away, eyes riveted to the device around Bruce’s neck. Or to Bruce’ neck itself.

“And I can think of a few people who would disagree with you there, darling.” Jerome had waved a dismissive hand at the crowd behind him, before flicking his eyes over to Jeremiah, eyebrow raised in provocation.

Jeremiah had simply glared back.

Bruce’s arms had been held loose at his sides, for all appearances, docile and cooperative, but Jeremiah had taken note of how his fists remained clenched. Whether he had been holding back from lashing out at Jerome, or if it had simply been a general sense of anger and helplessness at the situation, Jeremiah hadn’t been sure.

Things had certainly looked bad to him at that point. Whether the disruptor would work or not, and while Jeremiah may have trusted Bruce, he was not a hundred percent sure he could rely on Fox; without the snipers, there was nothing to stop Jerome from simply shooting them. Or stabbing them. Or having his flamethrower-wielding accomplice set them on fire.

“People are better than you give them credit for,” Bruce had said, still not backing down.

Jerome, arms still looped around Bruce’s neck, hadn’t answered right away. Instead he had stilled, in a way that had reminded Jeremiah of a predator, ready to strike, but still deciding where the prey was most vulnerable. He had just stared at Bruce for a long moment, head cocked to the side, eyes narrowed, and lips pursed.

Jeremiah had held his breath, waiting for Jerome to whip out a knife and stab Bruce with it.

Instead, he had laughed.

“You know what? As wonderful as it would have been to watch, I’m glad that hulking mass of muscle didn’t actually beat you to death. Remind me to send something nice to your girlfriend Selina as a thank you.”

He had darted in and pressed a kiss to Bruce’s cheek, before pulling back and patting him patronisingly on the same spot.

Jeremiah had been unable to avoid shifting uncomfortably, looking away from the scene, and that hadn’t escaped his brother’s notice. Jerome had stepped back, eyes flicking between the two of them, with a look on his face that Jeremiah hadn’t liked.

“Alright princess, why don’t you have a seat?” Jerome had said suddenly, turning back and pushing at Bruce’s shoulders.

Bruce, not expecting it, had stumbled backwards into the chair behind him, where one of Jerome’s men had immediately clamped his hands down on his shoulders, another rushing in to secure him to the seat.

“Make sure they’re tight. This one slippery.”

Jerome had ruffled a hand in Bruce’s hair, who had flinched away, before turning back to Jeremiah, snapping his fingers and gesturing impatiently for the second collar. Once he had it, he had nodded to the men behind Jeremiah, who had grabbed his arms and dragged him over to the other empty chair. He had been tied down tightly, but he hadn’t fought, eyes darting away, avoiding looking at Jerome. Looking instead to Bruce, to the rooftops filled with dead snipers, out to the crowd where he knew Gordon and Fox had been frantically trying to come up with a Plan B.

Later, when Jerome had lent in as he cut the bindings on his wrists, he had been close enough that Jeremiah had felt the warm puff of his breath on his face. Jeremiah had sat, frozen in his chair, unable to look away from Jerome, and torn between fear and anger and that sliver of love that held him back from truly hurting his brother and that little voice in the back of his head that cried at him to tear Jerome apart. Even as the knife was slipped into his hand, as the stage and the crowd and the world disappeared, Jeremiah hadn’t been able to look away. When he finally did lash out, it had been sloppy, and he hadn’t even gotten close before Jerome’s punch had knocked him to the ground. All he had been able to do was curl in on himself, taking kick after kick as Jerome professed his love.

If he had been able to breathe, Jeremiah might have laughed. Wasn’t that them all over?

Somewhere between the kicks and the gunshots, Jeremiah had lost consciousness for a moment or two, because the next thing he remembers after Jerome falling away was being turned gently onto his back, and Bruce’s worried face floating above him. Sitting up, Jeremiah had looked around for his brother, figuring that the fact Bruce was loose, and their heads were all still attached meant Fox’s jamming device must have worked.

Bruce’s reassurance that Jerome had run off after taking a bullet to the shoulder, but that Gordon would find him, had felt distant, far away, as had the shouts of the police and the screams of those still trying to escape the square. The knife Jerome had handed him had still been clutched in his hand, and he had been strangely reluctant to let it go, because even as the blimp turned away, even as Fox unlocked the rigged collar around his neck in a rush, even as Bruce’s hand on his arm anchored him to the present, Jeremiah hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that it wasn’t over yet, that something was going to go terribly, horribly wrong.

He would later tell himself that the sudden spasm of pain up his spine that knocked him back down to the ground was the delayed result of Jerome kicking the wrong spot, or a pinched nerve from one of the cultists jamming a gun into his back, and not the phantom pain of hitting the roof of a parked car after a ten-story drop.

*

Jeremiah is forced to postpone a meeting with Bruce when he receives a call from the GCPD telling him he can finally collect Jerome’s body. The police had snapped up the body quickly that night, following Jeremiah’s positive identification, and have since been performing all manner of invasive tests and inspections, no doubt trying to work out how Jerome cheated death the first time, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Since Jerome’s death, Jeremiah has often had nightmares about what comes after. Sometimes they’re about Jerome surviving, or coming back to finish what he started. Sometimes they’re about what happens to Jerome. How he died, and what happened next. Theoretically, he knows what an autopsy involves. He knows exactly what they did to his brother’s body, and he knows it was (it should have been) clinical and detached and professional. He even knows that Lucius Fox is the one who conducted the procedure. He knows all that and yet he can’t stop himself from fixating on it.

When he calls to rearrange their meeting, Bruce offers to go with him, but Jeremiah waves him off. He gives some excuse about wanting to be in and out quickly, about how Bruce must be very busy, about how this is family business, and Bruce accepts with easy understanding, and a touch of sympathy.

“Just call me if you need anything. Anything at all,” Bruce says before they bid each other farewell.

When Jeremiah arrives at GCPD Central, make-up and contacts and glasses firmly in place, Jim Gordon is waiting for him, ready to escort him to the precinct’s morgue. When they get there, there’s an officer stationed outside the door.

“We’ve had someone outside, around the clock, since he was brought in. Just in case,” Gordon says to Jeremiah’s unspoken question.

Just in case someone comes for the body? Just in case he comes back again? Either? Both? Probably both.

They step into the room, and Jeremiah’s eyes are immediately drawn to the table in the centre, where a white sheet covers what is obviously a body.

“I’ll be just outside. Let me know if you need anything, or when you’re done.”

Gordon rests his hand his shoulder for a moment, before stepping out of the room, closing the door softly behind him and leaving Jeremiah alone with his brother.

He steps up to the table, hands hovering above the sheet covering Jerome, and for a minute Jeremiah considers just leaving. Considers just walking out and never looking back and letting the GCPD do whatever the hell they liked with Jerome’s body. He never would though. He couldn’t. So Jeremiah reaches down and pulls back the sheet slowly, stopping only when it reaches Jerome’s hips.

He’s pale. So pale, edging into grey, that the black of the thread stands out almost obscenely. Jeremiah’s eyes wander over the y-incision that marks Jerome’s chest and disappears beneath the sheet. Roves back up over his face, where he can see how his brother’s mouth and eyelids have been sewn shut. The scars are still there, but they’ve somehow managed to relax his face enough that his mouth is no longer stretched into that awful rictus grin. In the harsh lighting of the room Jerome’s hair is a bright, vivid red. When he runs a hand through it, it’s soft, and Jeremiah can feel where his skull was cracked open and sewn back up again.

Jeremiah brushes his thumb against Jerome’s eyes, his mouth, feeling the rigid stitching. He touches his cheek, fingers tracing the scars along his jaw all the way around to his hairline. He hadn’t had a chance to properly look while Jerome was alive, reliant only on blurry news footage and the two brief encounters they had prior to his tumble off a roof. He remembers the horror he felt seeing Jerome’s disfigured face replayed over and over again on every news station. Horror at not only what his brother had done, and what he was doing, but at what had been done to him. Theo Galavan had been brought up, and footage from Jerome’s tape had been intercut with shots of that other man walking around, trying to whip up a frenzy with what looked like a cheap Halloween mask made of flesh attached to his face. When it finally clicked as to exactly what he was looking at, Jeremiah had emptied his stomach into the closest trashcan.

Looking now, the scars don’t appear infected, but Jerome’s face is still a mess. Who knows how the scars would have healed, given enough time. Time Jerome hadn’t been allowed.

With shaking hands Jeremiah pulls the sheet back up. He takes one unsteady step back, two, clutching at a nearby stool to keep himself upright. He tries to breathe through his mouth, so he doesn’t have to smell the bleached, chemical scent of the room, as well as the overwhelming perfume of death that he has to be imagining.

Jeremiah reaches into his pocket to pull out his phone. As he places the call to have the body collected and sent to the funeral home he’s already picked out, he stares distractedly at the sheet-covered corpse of his brother. After hanging up, he waits a few moments more, eyes glued to the white sheet as he counts his breaths, his heartbeats, before he exits the room to inform Gordon of what’s going to happen.

*

During the preparations for the funeral, Jeremiah is informed that someone has already ordered and paid for the tombstone that would mark Jerome’s grave. Jeremiah had been planning on picking the cheapest, most basic option; name, date of birth, date of death, but for whatever reason, he’s reluctant to refuse. He suspects Jerome’s cult are the ones responsible, though how they managed to scrape together the money, find the right funeral home, and get their order in before him, Jeremiah’s not sure. He doesn’t particularly care either.

When he had collected the body, Gordon had subtly tried to suggest an unmarked grave, no doubt worried about the at-large band of lunatics building a shrine at Jerome’s grave and making him into even more of a martyr. But Jeremiah figures, he’s dead; whatever his plans, whatever he tried to pull, Jeremiah’s the one who’s alive, so he can let his brother have at least this. And honestly, the first time he sees the proposed tombstone, he almost chokes on his laugher.

Jerome had had all but nothing to his name, and it was unlikely he had left any sort of will (the remains of the only bequeathment with any real meaning sat tucked away at the bottom of a draw, in the centre of a maze, twenty feet underground) but Jeremiah wouldn’t be surprised if his brother somehow had a hand in choosing that epitaph. The whole thing is oddly hilarious. The funeral director stares anxiously at Jeremiah as he laughs softly to himself, no doubt thinking him as mad as his dead twin. Jeremiah can see the fear in his eyes, and he has a creeping urge to dash the man’s head against the wall for it, but that’s not likely to lessen such comparisons, so instead, he signs off on it all, and leaves as quickly as he can.

The burial service itself is without incident. Only Jeremiah, a priest, and the men who would eventually lower Jerome into the ground. The rites are quick, but Jeremiah stays to watch as dirt is piled on top of the coffin. He doesn’t weep, doesn’t laugh, doesn’t gloat. He’s done all of that, one way or another, already. He just stands there, staring, as his brother, his so-called other half, is buried under six feet of soil. Jeremiah watches until the sun slips down below the horizon and the air chills and the grave is full, and as he crawls into bed that night, thinking of the tombstone, he prays to a god he doesn’t believe in, that yes, this time will be the charm.

*

Jerome’s belongings arrive from Arkham two days after the funeral. There’s a few bits and pieces, a couple of knives, the clothing he was wearing the night he took Bruce hostage and was subsequently arrested, fan mail from members of his cult, and a gaudily decorated journal.

No doubt it was all looked over with a fine-toothed comb following Jerome’s escape, and again after his death, so Jeremiah isn’t worried about any more booby-traps. He still burns the clothing and the letters. He keeps the knives though. He’s not quite sure why, only that it seems more practical to. Why waste perfectly good knives? The journal he leaves sitting in the bottom draw of his desk for two days before he finally gives in and starts reading it.

He regrets it.

The book is a horrific and disturbing mix of thoughts and ideas and fantasies, everything that went on inside Jerome’s head, everything he was, poured out onto the page, alongside all his plans on how to lay waste to Gotham, to bring its knees in the most brutal ways possible.

Jerome was nothing if not creative, Jeremiah would give him that.

And he may have been insane, but he wasn’t brainless. He had, after all, held the city hostage not once, not twice, but three separate times. He had wrapped both Akham staff and Arkham patients around his finger. He had tracked Jeremiah down despite every effort he had made to disappear. For all the horror and the obscenity and the madness in these pages, there’s also a startling logic that stands out to Jeremiah, a soundness to the plans that make them, despite their disturbing nature, appear feasible.

In amongst the general fantasies of murder and mayhem, and obsessive and fixated railings against Lila, three names occur again and again. His, Jim Gordon’s and Bruce Wayne’s. The thoughts and the plans and the fantasies about him are no true surprise, albeit with a darker, more uncomfortable tinge than Jeremiah might have expected, and nothing worse than what his own mind has conjured up over the years – he’s spent a long time afraid of Jerome. The plans for Gordon are not that shocking either. Him and Jerome had butted heads a number of times, and Jerome was not one who liked being thwarted. He also clearly enjoyed killing cops.

It’s Jerome’s thoughts towards Bruce that are really unsettling, though Jeremiah’s not entirely sure why. On the surface they’re no worse than any of the others, but just the thought of Bruce and Jerome interacting, of Jerome speaking to Bruce or hurting him or even looking at him makes Jeremiah’s fingers itch for something sharp.

Jeremiah considers burning the journal too, but instead he tosses it in the draw with the empty jack-in-the-box and drinks himself to sleep.

That night Jeremiah dreams about killing Jim Gordon.

*

They don’t always meet at Jeremiah’s bunker, or at one of the Wayne Enterprises facilities commandeered for the project. Occasionally Bruce will bring him to the manor, and years at a private, elite boarding school, along with the occasional visit to some of the most beautiful buildings in the city, had not prepared Jeremiah for the size and easy opulence of the home of Gotham’s oldest and richest family, cavernous and empty as it appears to be these days.

One such night, finds the both of them seated in the study, and what, Bruce tells him, used to be his father’s office. The clouds that had hung low over the city all day had finally broken open, and the rain and wind lashed loudly at the windows.

Jeremiah knows Pennyworth is still here, but aside from a brief nod of acknowledgement, and a borderline curt “Mr. Valeska” as he let him in, he’s made himself scarce, leaving the two of them all but alone. Jeremiah’s still trying to get a read on how Pennyworth feels about him, and more importantly, how he feels about him and Bruce spending time together. From what Bruce has said, his butler has never made a habit of hiding his distaste of someone, so either he’s fine with it, or he’s still reserving judgement. Jeremiah, personally, doesn’t care what the man thinks, but Bruce does. Bruce might be an adult now, but Alfred Pennyworth is the man who all but raised him, and so his opinion holds weight. If anything, Bruce seems quick to agree to almost anything Pennyworth says, and more than once Jeremiah has caught Bruce throwing sad, guilty looks at the older man’s turned back. It would take a lot to disrupt that ingrained level of regard and affection.

Jeremiah finds himself asking Bruce if he has any other family, curious about the answer. Thomas Wayne was well known as an only child, but Jeremiah knows very little about Martha Wayne and her family. He apparently does, but he barely considers them so. Bruce tells him that he has uncles on his mother’s side, and a cousin named Kate, but that his mother had never talked about them, and he hasn’t seen or heard from them since the funeral.

There was clearly some sort of falling out between Martha Kane and her family, which might be why Thomas and Martha had left the entirety of their fortune to their son, and their son’s guardianship to the family butler. Jeremiah itches to know more, but Bruce doesn’t seem interested in digging further. Which makes sense, why want someone who clearly doesn’t want you?

Jeremiah finds himself wanting to spill his own family secrets.

“Did you know my mother lied to me about who my father was?” He says, pulling Bruce’s attention away from the fire he had been broodily staring into. “Lied to the both of us?”

Bruce looks at him, so genuinely sympathetic that it makes Jeremiah want to kiss him. Then maybe hit him.

“He worked at the circus, one of the fortune tellers. He was blind, actually, and we used to see him quite a bit. He was kind enough, I guess you could say, in his own way, but she never actually told me, not even after I left. I only found out by piecing together all the reports and articles about Jerome.”

Jerome hadn’t known either. Not until after she was dead.

“I was so afraid of him, for so long. Every day, for years, for my whole life, he’s been all I’ve been able to think about.”

He feels Bruce move closer, until they’re sitting side by side, his leg pressed against Jeremiah’s. A hand rests tentatively on his knee.

“Every time he was terrorising the city, every time he got loose, and for years before that, I’d dream about it. What I’d do if he ever found me.” Jeremiah stares into the fire, but he can feel Bruce’s eyes on him all the same.

“There’s a part of me that’s glad he’s dead. Not because it means I can finally stop looking over my shoulder, or because it means he can’t ever hurt anyone else. But because it means I never have to find out whether I could have done it myself. Whether I would have killed my own brother.”

He turns his head towards Bruce, letting out a humourless laugh.

“Isn’t that awful?”

Bruce leans in, the light of the fire shifting over the planes of his face, making his eyes burn.

“No,” he says, so, so kindly. “It’s not awful.”

Jeremiah wants very much to believe him. He wants to believe he’s not a monster. That he’s not Jerome.

“Remember when I said I would have saved him?” Jeremiah nods. “Well, that night at the carnival, the night of the blackouts, when he kidnapped me, I almost killed him.”

That, Jeremiah hadn’t been expecting.

“It was when he took me to the circus down at the boardwalk. He had tried to kill me, tried to blow me up with an actual cannonball of all things, but I had gotten loose, and I got him to follow me into the hall of mirrors.” Bruce pauses, looking over at Jeremiah to judge his reaction. Jeremiah just nods at him to continue.

“We fought,” Bruce said. “I managed to get him on the ground, and I thought- I had thought Alfred was dead. I didn’t care about what Jerome had done to me, but all I knew in that moment was that Alfred was dead and I was so, so angry. I had Jerome under me, bleeding and grinning and muttering “come on”, and there was the shard of mirror in my hand, and… and Alfred was dead.”

“He’s that important to you? Alfred?”

“He’s family,” Bruce doesn’t hesitate to reply, so sure of this truth. “He’s always been family, even before my parents…” Bruce cuts himself off, swallowing. “Even then, he was family. He’s always been family.”

“Then what stopped you?” Jeremiah is genuinely curious. “Your life was in danger, and after everything Jerome had done, no one would have blamed you.”

“Honestly? I saw myself in the mirror, and I hated what I saw. All I could think about was that this wasn’t me. I…” Jeremiah can hear the slightest tremor in Bruce’s voice. “I wasn’t a murderer. I couldn’t let that be who I was. There are lines. Lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Not ever.”

Bruce pauses, biting his bottom lip between his teeth as he works himself up to continuing.

“I think,” he says slowly, carefully. “I think he wanted me to do it. That he would have been happy dying there if it was me doing it. He wanted me to kill him and prove him right. Prove that, deep down, we’re all killers. We just need permission.”

Yes, Jeremiah thinks, that sounds like Jerome. He probably would have been happy dying up on that stage beneath Jeremiah and the knife if it meant proving he was right.

“Maybe he was right,” Bruce says, mostly to himself.

“Pardon?” Jeremiah asks.

“Jerome. Maybe he was right. Maybe, deep down, no matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, or promise, we’re all just animals. Killers.”

Jeremiah reaches out to grasp Bruce’s hand. It’s cold, and Jeremiah can feel it trembling. He hates seeing Bruce so clearly upset, almost as much as he hates the idea of Jerome being right in any way.

“You don’t actually believe that. I know you don’t.”

Bruce shakes his head.

“You don’t know. You have no idea. What I’ve done. What-”

“We’ve all made mistakes, all done things we regret, that we’re not proud of,” Jeremiah pauses, wondering if he dares continue. He does. “In all honesty Bruce, I don’t think there’s anything you could tell me that would make me think less of you.”

“That’s…” Bruce cuts himself off, staring at Jeremiah with wide, blinking eyes, his face a mix of awkwardness and bewilderment. It’s a bit hard to tell in the dim lighting, but Jeremiah thinks Bruce might even be blushing. He’s still holding Bruce’s hand.

“I mean it,” Jeremiah says, truthfully, leaning forward and making sure Bruce meets his eyes. He really does mean it. Jeremiah can’t imagine Bruce could ever, truly disappoint him.

Bruce inhales, clearly working himself up to something.

“About a month or so ago, I was… I went through… it was bad. I was drinking, partying… other things. Bought a club. Which, now that I think about it, I’m surprised they let a seventeen-year-old do.”

“I’ve noticed that, on the whole, this city, particularly certain parts of it, aren’t too concerned with the rule of law, more-so when money is involved.”

“You’re not wrong, but still… Anyway, the people I was hanging out with, they weren’t friends. Grace, Tommy, maybe, although he is kind of an ass, but the others were acquaintances at best, strangers we would pick up as the night would wear on at worst. I knew what they all wanted from me, and shallow as it was, I liked it. I couldn’t stand being around people that genuinely cared about me. I just wanted to forget. Wanted to drown myself and never come up for air. And it made me, frankly, an asshole. Mostly to Selina and Alfred, but still, in general too.” He looks over at Jeremiah. “You wouldn’t have liked me.”

Jeremiah only partially agrees. The thought of a loose, inhibitionless, self-destructive Bruce does have its appeal.

“What happened, Bruce?” Jeremiah asks.

“I had bought this knife at an auction. It was old, incredibly old, but I had Barbara Kean, among others, jump down my throat, all but threatening me over it.” Bruce lets out a deep breath. “I wanted to know what was so important about the knife, why people wanted it so badly, beyond whatever it could be worth as just an antiquity piece. So, I took it to an expert at the Natural History Museum. The night I did, someone broke in and murdered him.”

Bruce tugs his hand loose, and cradles his head in his hands, pulling lightly at his hair. Jeremiah wants to reach across that space and touch him. Comfort him.

“His grandson, Alex, had taken the knife and hid,” Bruce continues, though he doesn’t raise his head. “We managed to track him down, and we were hiding in the museum, talking. Turns out he went to my old school. He knew me. Or of me at least. They all do. Apparently, I’m somewhat…”

“Famous?” Jeremiah suggests.

Bruce looks up, nodding.

“But, but they found us. They found us, and he killed Alex and I, I just stood there.” Bruce’s voice breaks on the last word

And that explains quite a lot to Jeremiah. Bruce blames himself for this boy’s, and no doubt his grandfather’s, deaths, so he attempted to bury the guilt, attempted to stop feeling anything real at all, and when that didn’t work, he tried denying himself as a form of punishment.

“Did they catch him,” Jeremiah asks, carefully, because he has a feeling there is something more to this than simple misplaced guilt. Something that is just outside his reach, he’s just not sure what yet. “The man who killed your friend?”

Bruce looks away, hesitant, hiding something but clearly wanting to continue.

“They caught him, sort of. He’s gone now in any case. But I just couldn’t handle it. Any of it. Alex was dead, and things just went horribly wrong, just spiralled out of control from there and it was all too much.”

Bruce pushes himself up from the couch, shaking almost imperceptibly, and starts pacing the room.

“I pushed Alfred away, fired him actually, not just because he kept butting in, trying to stop me, but because he was just a reminder of my parents, of promises I had made and then broken and I couldn’t stand the way he was looking at me. Disappointed, but like he still loved me. After what I had done he still kept trying to pull me back, and I couldn’t deal with it.”

“Bruce, you’re hardly the first teenager to go off the rails a bit. And really, given everything you have seen, everything that’s happened to you, no one would blame you for being a little…” Jeremiah makes an abstract gesture with his fingers, pulling a choked laugh out of Bruce. “So cut yourself a little slack.”

Then, “It wasn’t your fault.”

Bruce looks at Jeremiah like he doesn’t believe him in the slightest, but he’s still a little grateful for the lie.

“What happened then?” Jeremiah asks. “You’re clearly trying to dial back on the poor-decision making. At least those kinds of poor decisions.”

“The hangovers eventually got too much to deal with,” Bruce says, the sarcasm and eyebrow back in full force. “Also, there was this woman, Ivy Pepper. She was interested in something the company was working on. She, well, she drugged me essentially. Then left me to die.”

Jeremiah’s head snaps up to stare at him, furious.

“Right over there actually,” he says, gesturing faux carelessly to the carpet at Jeremiah’s feet. “Oh, no, it’s fine,” He hurries to add, catching sight of Jeremiah’s face. “Jim and Lucius arrived with an antidote in time.”

Jeremiah hums, not entirely placated. The name Ivy Pepper rings a bell, and he vaguely recalls something about a recent murder spree, and a red-headed woman on the news ranting about plants. He makes a mental note to see what he can find on her.

“Anyway, while I was in the process of dying, I hallucinated something awful, and I don’t know, I woke up, with Jim and Lucius kneeling over me, worried out of their minds, and things just clicked back together.”

“So, a deadly, drug-induced hallucination gave you an epiphany? Hmm, I’ll have to remember that.”

“That’s not what I said,” Bruce is laughing, but he sobers up quickly enough. “It felt like I was waking up, really waking up, for the first time in months. I guess, I remembered who I was supposed to be. What I was supposed to be.”

Bruce turns away, idly toying with a paperweight from his desk. The room falls into silence, broken only by the soft crackling of the fire in the hearth. The quiet isn’t uncomfortable quite yet, and Jeremiah takes the opportunity to just look at Bruce. To stare at the long line of his back. Jeremiah may have the slightest height advantage right now, but Bruce is tall, and bound to get taller. He stares at what he can see of Bruce’s face, the tip of his nose, that lovely jawline, the rich, thick head of hair that curls charmingly when Bruce lets it. He stares at the breadth of Bruce’s shoulders, that are only going to get wider, gaze travelling down to his waist, lower.

Beautiful is the only word Jeremiah can think of to describe him, and it takes every bit of self-control he has not to walk up behind him and press up against him. To place his hands on Bruce’s hips and bury his face into his neck. To bend him over that desk and-

Jeremiah cuts the thought off before it progresses far enough that things start getting uncomfortable. Now is hardly the time, and he doubts Bruce would be entirely receptive to all that. At least not at the moment.

Or maybe he would be. Given what Bruce had just told him, he’s no stranger to poor decisions. Or pleasure. Not that Jeremiah’s looking for frantic make-outs in dark club corners. Or a cheap one-night stand. Or-

Jeremiah downs the rest of his drink in one quick gulp.

Anyway.

There’s more to Bruce’s story than a simple teenage rebellion spurred on by the death of an acquaintance, and Jeremiah wants to know more, almost desperately. He wants to know everything about Bruce. What he wants, what he fears, what he dreams. Every dirty, ugly, bloody, awful thought he’s ever had. He wants to know what drove Bruce to cut off the people who loved him and drown himself in the various vices the city offered to someone with Bruce’s looks and youth and money. Whatever has Bruce, even now, ashamed and guilty and self-destructive. He wants to know, but he can’t push, not yet. Bruce is hiding things from him, hiding parts of himself, but it would be hypocritical for Jeremiah to truly be mad at him for that. After all, he’s doing the same.

A fork of lightning shoots across the sky, lighting up the room with a flash, followed almost immediately by the accompanying crash of thunder.

“It’s late,” Bruce says, finally turning back around. “And you shouldn’t have to drive home in this weather. You can stay here tonight if you like.”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Jeremiah replies, almost too quickly. “I don’t want to put you out.” He doesn’t, really, but Bruce is inviting him to stay the night in his house, under the same roof, and just the thought of that makes him feel almost giddy.

Bruce shakes his head, smiling, dark mood lifting.

“No trouble. We have more than enough room.”

After that they continue talking, late into the night, although they try to keep the rest of their conversation light. At one point, Bruce ducks out of the room, intending to track down his butler to inform him of their overnight guest. When he returns, he seems in as good a mood as before, so Jeremiah assumes that Pennyworth must not have opposed Bruce’s offer of hospitality.

When they eventually decide to turn in, Bruce shows him to a made-up room just down the hall from his own. He tells him they always keep at least one room guest-ready, for all the people who tend to drop by the manor unannounced, often needing a place to stay.

Jeremiah hopes Bruce isn’t referring to Selina Kyle, not liking the idea of sleeping in the same bed as her. Although he admittedly does enjoy the implication that when she does stay, she doesn’t share Bruce’s bed.

Before he leaves, Bruce hands him a pair of flannel pants and a t-shirt, which feel impossibly soft when he changes into them. He’s not sure if they belong to Bruce, or if they are perhaps a relic of his father’s that Bruce cannot let go of, but Jeremiah imagines he can smell Bruce on them all the same.

In the dark, he lays awake for a long while, listening to the sounds of the manor and grounds around him. He’s not tired, mind occupied with going over everything he has learned tonight, and with the thought of Bruce, asleep in his bed, so close, but he must fall asleep eventually, because he wakes gradually to sunlight peeking through the gaps in the curtains. He feels well rested, and if he dreamed, he doesn’t remember it.

He makes use of the attached en-suite, showering quickly and changing back into his clothes from the night before. Jeremiah is grateful that he has taken to carrying around his make-up and a spare set of contacts whenever he leaves the bunker, as it means he doesn’t have to worry about his secret slipping out.

He’s planning on telling Bruce eventually. Just… not yet.

Jeremiah intends to make a polite, if swift exit, feeling oddly out of place in the manor now that the sun is up, along with that constant, creeping, urge to retreat back to his home. But he runs into Bruce coming out of his room, and while the younger man is dressed, his feet are bare and his hair is a mess, and it must short circuit something in his brain because Jeremiah somehow allows himself to be bullied into at least staying for breakfast.

*

When he’s not with Bruce, Jeremiah spends most of his days and nights feeling hunted, and it’s only getting worse. During the day, he’s constantly looking over his shoulder, always trying to catch sight of the shadow dogging his steps. He’s grateful, in a way, that him and Jerome have become so different from who they used to be. There’s no risk of looking in the mirror and getting confused about which one of them was looking back.

He’s also kept track of Jerome’s cult, not that they’re trying too hard to hide. They’re not the brightest bunch, but Jeremiah’s not keen on the idea of letting them get too close. They’d no doubt try to tear him apart. Fortunately, they haven’t come near him, and they don’t appear to be looking either, but in all honesty, they’re not who Jeremiah is truly worried about. The real threat is the one in his head. In his blood.

At night, when he finally sleeps, he dreams of Jerome, his knife against his throat and his gun to his head. He dreams of their mother, listening to her and whoever she’s picked up this week through the thin walls as he huddles on the bed with Jerome, both so much smaller back then, and too scared to let their guard down for even a moment. He dreams of his uncle and his fists, and the blind old man who turned out to be his father. He dreams of what Jerome did to them all, and he dreams about what he wanted to do to them too. He wakes from restless and uneasy sleep with the feel of his brother’s lips against his neck, his laugh ringing in his ears.

The bunker no longer feels safe as it once did. He misses the comfort of his labyrinth. The way he would sit at its centre, the only one who knew how to escape, and feel secure. More than anything, he wants to recreate that feeling. He’s just not sure how to do it. When he’s not working on the generators, tweaking the designs to improve energy transference, he sketches new mazes. He thinks about redoing the complex. Starting fresh, rebuilding from scratch, but it doesn’t feel like enough anymore. He needs to look outside his concrete hole. He needs to think bigger.

The only time he feels comfortable anymore is when he’s with Bruce, but even he can’t hold back the paranoia and the fear forever. The need to do something, anything, is getting harder and harder to ignore, thoughts and ideas and plans constantly ticking over in the back of his head. Jeremiah knows exactly what his generators are capable of, as well as exactly what they could do with a few minor, undetectable modifications. It’s all theoretical of course, testing the limits of his work, and thinking ahead to the potential of the project, but he still finds himself pouring over Jerome’s journal, and not everything he begins to feel is pure disgust.

(Although there is still some of that. Jeremiah could do without the detailed insight into his twin brother’s inappropriate sexual murder fantasies. There are easier ways to kill someone. Or to have sex.)

Instead he’s taking notes. Critiquing Jerome’s plans and making adjustments. As he does it becomes clear to him just how easy it would be to carry some of them out. How easy it would be to kill Jim Gordon. To bring Gotham to its knees. Jerome had done it, more than once in fact, so surely, Jeremiah could do it better.

*

Bruce’s employees all seem to like him. Or at least, the general staff do. Jeremiah has heard more than one rant from Bruce about the overall uselessness of the majority of his company’s executive board. The old and privileged men and women who, without vigilant oversight, have grown rich and powerful at the expense of Gotham’s most vulnerable, and who now resent and resist the rule of a younger, more stubborn leader who will not tolerate continued corruption within the company.

Everyone else, however, seems to love him. The guards that work at the storage facility always greet him with enthusiasm, and Bruce responds by asking about their lives, their families, remembering details that anyone else would have forgotten. Bruce may be the head of the company, existing on a level far above their own, but he doesn’t act like it, and this endears him to them.

Jeremiah has little interest in the lives of the multitude around him, but he likes to watch Bruce work. Likes to watch how he changes his tone, his posture, his way of speaking and moving in order to get the most out of any conversation. Whether he’s after information, or he just wants to put someone at ease, or he’s genuinely interested in whatever’s being said, it’s fascinating to watch.

Gotham itself loves Bruce. He’s their prince, their favourite son, their tragic, heartbreaking orphan. It helps that under his brief watch, Wayne Enterprises’ reputation has already improved, aided, no doubt by the improved benefits and conditions for staff that Bruce insisted on, making the company, according to whoever measures these things, one of the best places to work in the country.

The city loves him, and now that he’s eighteen, it also means that he is, for lack of a better term, ‘fair game’. On the rare occasion the two of them have ventured out in public together, he usually catches sight of at least one reporter or photographer following them. Bruce usually spots them first, and he always frowns in annoyance in the same way, nose scrunched up and brows drawn down in a way that Jeremiah finds utterly charming, though he’s sure Bruce wouldn’t appreciate him sharing that sentiment. Still, they both resent the invasion of privacy, which is why they generally stay in the office, or at either of their homes. Jeremiah’s not sure if anyone has worked out who exactly he is yet, and more importantly who he’s related to, but the last thing he wants is Jerome’s ghost hanging over them again.

*

After weeks of work, the generators are all but done. The extras have been assembled, awaiting the finishing touches, and any last-minute changes Jeremiah might choose to test with the prototype, but all in all, they’re ready.

Standing in the lab, staring at racks of generators, Jeremiah thinks that yes, he could change the world with these.

*

It’s close to midnight when Bruce calls, though Jeremiah is still awake. He has recently taken to looking over maps of Gotham and creating mazes out of the streets as a way to pass the time. He’s in the middle of considering if “knocking down” the clock tower to use the rubble as a wall should be considered cheating, when his phone goes off.

He looks down to see who’s calling, and his mood is instantly brightened when he sees who it is.

“Bruce!” he says after hitting the accept button. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you tonight. How are you?”

“… Jeremiah?”

Jeremiah is instantly alert. There is something off with Bruce’s voice, and if he didn’t know better, he’d say Bruce was scared.

“Bruce? Are you okay?”

“No. I don’t know. I can’t… I just…”

“What do you need Bruce?”

“I just need…” he hears Bruce take a slow, deep breath. “I need to see you.”

“Okay, whatever you need. Do you want me to come over? It shouldn’t take me long, about-”

“No!” Bruce cuts him off. “Don’t come here. It’s not safe. You wouldn’t be safe. I’ll, I’ll come to you. If that’s alright? You’re not busy, are you? I’m sorry, you’re probably-”

“Bruce,” Jeremiah interrupts his rambling. “It’s fine. I’m not busy. Come straight over, I’ll be right here.”

“Okay,” he says, less frantic, but still unsettled. “Okay. I’ll be there soon.”

“Drive safely,” Jeremiah tells him before hanging up. The last thing he wants is Bruce killing himself on the way over because he wasn’t paying attention to the road. He drives fast enough as it is.

*

‘Shaken’ is the first word that comes to mind when Jeremiah sees Bruce. He meets him at the door, ushering him quickly inside before relocking it.

“Thank you. I know it’s late, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t stay at the manor, it wasn’t safe.” Bruce runs his hands through his hair and stares up at the ceiling. “God, Alfred is going to be furious. He doesn’t know I’m here,” he adds at Jeremiah’s questioning look. “I just, I couldn’t stay there. Much less sleep there.”

Jeremiah was right in his initial assumption. Bruce is scared. Very scared, and that’s no mean feat. He’s not sure he’s ever seen Bruce scared, not in person at least, and not lately. Even facing down Jerome with a bomb around his neck, Bruce had been angry, if collected, but not scared.

“You mentioned that on the phone. You said the manor wasn’t safe. Safe from what?”

Bruce laughs, but it’s a hollow, wrecked sound.

“Anyone. Anything. People just keep walking in whenever they please. Usually so they can kill me. Or at the very least, kidnap me. Fuck, I do need better security. Maybe you have the right idea.”

Jeremiah doesn’t think he’s ever heard Bruce swear. Maybe it’s just another sign of how off-kilter he is. And Jeremiah’s not going to even touch the reference to the numerous attempts made on Bruce’s life within his own home. It’s clearly a sore spot for them both. Instead, he leads Bruce into his office, nudging him towards the couch as he turns to pour them drinks.

Bruce stays seated for a few moments, sipping at his drink, before he’s up on his feet again, pacing the room. Every dozen or so steps he stops, looks at Jeremiah, opens his mouth to say something, decides against it, and continues pacing. After about five minutes of this, Jeremiah decides to break the silence, the frantic pacing putting him on edge.

“It’s okay Bruce,” he says. “You don’t have to tell me what happened, whatever has you so shaken, if you don’t want to. You don’t have to say anything.”

Bruce stops, and when he looks at Jeremiah, he looks almost on the verge of tears.

“But you can trust me Bruce, with anything,” Jeremiah says, as Bruce moves closer. “I hope you know that.”

“I do. I know that Jeremiah, I honestly do. And I want to tell you, more than anything. But I can’t… I can’t drag you into this. I can’t let you get hurt.”

“That’s sweet of you Bruce, truly. But I’m an adult, and I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt. Doesn’t make you immortal.” Bruce’s voice is quiet, small. He reaches down to pick up his drink, taking a sip before continuing. “All I know is that something terrible is going to happen and I’m not sure I can stop it. Something awful is coming and you know the funniest thing about it? Out of everyone in my life, I think you are the only person I can really, truly trust.”

Jeremiah’s heart sings.

“And god knows I can’t trust Selina.”

That brings Jeremiah up short. When talking about Selina Kyle in the past, Bruce has swung between infatuated, confused, frustrated and hurt, but this is different. Right now, Bruce is feeling angry. Bruce is feeling betrayed.

“Tabitha Galavan and her brother tried to kill me, you know?” Bruce says, something like bitterness creeping into his voice. “They sent someone to seduce me. They held the name of my parent’s murder over my head, so I would sell them my company. Tabitha did it again, just last night. She used me, lured me in using someone I cared about and in doing so, put god knows how many lives in danger. She is a criminal. Her and Barbara Kean have killed so, so many people, and Selina is friends with them. She looks up to them. She rejected Ivy for killing but stands by them. Even tonight as they betrayed us, she still chooses them, still defends them. Again, and again. And all the while she keeps pulling away. Every single time we get close, every single time we take a step towards each other, she’s lashing out, telling me to “have a nice life”, and I don’t understand. I don’t understand how she can happily leave Gotham to its ruin, to the criminals that chip away at it, that bleed it out each and every day. I don’t understand how she can say she knows me, that she cares about me, and expect me to do the same.”

Bruce trails off, visibly collapsing in on himself as Jeremiah steps in front of him, stopping his pacing in its tracks. Bruce avoids looking at him, staring up at the ceiling instead, but Jeremiah gently grips his chin and tilts his head down

“What Selina Kyle does, what she chooses to do and what she chooses to be, is not on you,” he says firmly, eyes locked onto Bruce’s. “It is no reflection of you, nor is it the result of any sort of failure on your part.”

Bruce looks gutted, worn down and burnt up, and Jeremiah doesn’t think he has ever hated anyone as much as he hates Selina Kyle in this moment. Who is she to not want this brilliant, beautiful boy? Who is she to take that trust, that unwavering devotion, and toss it aside? To waste her loyalty and affections on the petty and unworthy, when there are others who would kill to have what is being offered to her freely? It’s the anger that pushes Jeremiah to go further than he probably should, to let slip something that has been building within him for weeks. Something he has known as an absolute since the first moment he laid eyes on Bruce.

“Bruce,” he says, letting go of his chin but reaching to take hold of his wrists, desperate to keep Bruce in place, desperate for Bruce to understand. “You deserve someone who loves you unconditionally. Someone who will always choose you. And that’s not Selina Kyle.”

Jeremiah watches warily as Bruce steps back, downs the rest of his drink, then rolls the empty glass between his hands. He’s looking down, not meeting Jeremiah’s eyes, and Jeremiah is worried he may have overstepped, may have pushed too far, too quickly, and made Bruce uncomfortable. Bruce’s brow is ever so slightly furrowed and his chin firm in a way Jeremiah has come to recognise as the look Bruce tends to get when he has decided on a course of action he won’t be deterred from. He’s become quite familiar with that look.

Familiarity, however, does not prepare Jeremiah for Bruce turning to carefully place his glass on the table behind him, before spinning back around and kissing him.

Admittedly, Jeremiah doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of experience in kissing. Sex was somewhat of a different story, but when it came to kissing, there had only ever been a few boys from school, and Ecco, once, just to see if he liked it (he hadn’t). Still, he can say, with absolute certainty, that this is the best kiss he has ever had.

Bruce is pressed up against him, the entire, burning length of him, clutching at Jeremiah’s shoulders and trying to get closer. The angle is a little off, and his glasses are digging into his face, but Jeremiah opens his mouth and Bruce takes advantage immediately, his tongue slipping inside, and it’s wet and hot and absolutely perfect.

Bruce slides a hand into his hair as Jeremiah rests a palm on the side of his face, thumb rubbing along his cheekbone. His other hand skims down Bruce’s back, grabbing at his ass when it gets low enough, and using the grip to pull him nearer, moving them both in a way that makes Bruce moan.

It almost kills him to put a stop to it.

Bruce makes an attempt to pull him back in, desperate, pleading noises spilling off his tongue and Jeremiah has never seen or heard anything so tempting. Still, he takes Bruce’s face in his hands, pecks him on the lips, and leaves it at that. As much as it pains him to pull back, as much as he wants to press in closer, push Bruce down, give him everything, crawl inside Bruce and never leave, it’s clear Bruce is nervous, unsteady, and borderline traumatised by whatever had him rushing over in the first place.

Pushing too hard now would just scare Bruce off. Send him running back to Selina Kyle in a muddle of guilt and confusion and misplaced ideas on what he should want. Better for both of them to wait. Jeremiah has time.

Jeremiah can be patient.

*

On the surface, the kiss changes little. Bruce is a little awkward the next time they see each other, but they move past it quickly enough, and that could just as easily be attributed to his near breakdown and the Selina-related issues he let loose. They work together just as well as before, with a renewed sense of energy now that they’re nearing completion of the project. They don’t talk about what happened, but neither do they avoid each other’s company. They continue on exactly as they have been.

Beneath that, however, Jeremiah is going mad. If his feelings for Bruce had been a steadily growing flame before, now they are an inferno, burning him up. All he can think about is Bruce. The sight of him, the feel of him, the scent of him, the taste of him. He hates Bruce for kissing him almost as much as he hates himself for pulling away. Bruce talks about the future, about all the ways they’re going to make Gotham, the world, a better place, together, and it is all Jeremiah has ever wanted. He wants that. He wants the two of them, together, for the rest of their lives, rebuilding this city. Making it better. He wants to give Gotham to Bruce. He wants to give him the world.

The only time he’s not thinking about Bruce is when he’s thinking about blowing Gotham half to hell.

*

Jeremiah’s not sure exactly when he makes the decision. Maybe it creeps up on him. Maybe the weeks of critiquing Jerome’s plans and transforming Gotham into a labyrinth in his sketches and brainstorming the potential of his generators had always been building to this. All he knows is that he wakes one morning, certain right down to his bones that Gotham was beyond repair, that it needed to be rebuilt, and who better to do it than him.

For his tentative, emerging plan to work, there are a lot of moving parts. Machines and buildings may be easy to design, to program, to destroy, but people are generally messy, selfish and illogical, and often, stubbornly resilient. Thankfully, Jeremiah is very good at keeping track of multiple, complex pieces, not to mention, planning for contingencies. He’s kept an eye on the city’s major players and is confident in his ability to plan around all the conflicting agendas. James Gordon is predictable enough, easy to leverage, as is the rest of the GCPD, and he knows exactly where Jerome’s cult is, and how best to manipulate them – dull and moronic and insane as they all may be, they’re useful, at least for now.

And Ecco. Loyal, steadfast Ecco. He is grateful for her now more than ever. He barely has to say a word before she understands him. He can trust most of what he needs to be done to her, and knows that it will be carried out perfectly.

His biggest fear is that Bruce might prove to be too intransigent. Bruce’s stubbornness and devotion is part of what makes him so fascinating, part of what makes Jeremiah love him, but it also makes him quite rigid in his moral beliefs, and he’s bound to have an issue or two with demolishing half the city. Not to mention, he’s overly fond of Gordon. With time he knows he can win Bruce over, or at least wear him down, but his timeline may not allow him such leniency. In truth he can’t imagine his new world without Bruce. Just the thought of rebuilding the city without Bruce at his side makes the whole thing feel incomplete, almost pointless, despite understanding the unfortunate truth that sometimes progress requires sacrifice. Jeremiah does understand that, and if it comes down to a choice between his own goals, and Bruce, Jeremiah knows which one he’ll pick. But he’ll hate it, he’ll regret it, and Jeremiah can only hope it won’t come to that.

It may just be that Bruce will need a little push.

He thinks back to what Bruce had told him about that woman named Ivy Pepper. Thinks of Johnathan Crane, and Jerome, and the jack-in-the-box that’s sitting at the bottom of his desk draw.

Whatever it takes, Jeremiah thinks. Whatever it takes to keep Bruce by his side.

*

Jeremiah pulls out his phone, dials the number he’s learned by heart, and waits for two, three rings before-

“Hello?”

“Bruce, hello.”

“Jeremiah?”

Jeremiah closes his eyes for a moment. He has yet to tire of hearing Bruce say his name. After so many years of a false name spoken again and again by people he felt nothing for, hearing his name from Bruce is both a comfort and a shock to the system.

When he opens his eyes again, he catches sight of the clock on his desk, and notices for the first time how late it actually is.

“Oh, I hadn’t even looked at the time Bruce, I’m so sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, no, it’s fine. I was looking over some work papers, and I am somewhat of a night owl, so I’ll be up for a while still anyway. Is everything alright though? Are you okay?”

Bruce sounds concerned, if still genuinely happy to hear his voice, and Jeremiah wants to hold on to the warmth that that knowledge invokes for as long as he can. Proof perhaps, that he may not have to give this up completely.

“I’m fine. I just wanted to let you know that we are all but done. Everything should be ready by Tuesday, if that works for you. If we get started at our normal time, we can hook the first generator up to the bunker and then go from there.”

“Really?” Bruce asks, excitement creeping into his voice. “That’s incredible. You, you are incredible. I wasn’t sure we could get it done so quickly, but you were right.”

“I like to think I usually am.”

Bruce laughs.

“And really, I couldn’t have done it without you. I won’t ever be able to express how grateful I am to you.”

“You give me too much credit. They were your designs. All I did was give you a bit of money and some warehouse space.”

Bruce and his inability to take a sincere compliment. Jeremiah is going to have to work on his self-esteem.

“Bruce,” Jeremiah says firmly. “It is important to me that you understand this. We are partners. I couldn’t have done any of this without you, and this is just the first step for us in changing the world.”

“Right, yes, you’re right. Partners. It’s just,” Bruce adds hesitantly. “You’ve seemed, if you don’t mind me saying, a little off lately. I didn’t want you rushing or working yourself too hard, that’s all.”

“I swear Bruce, I’m fine. Better than fine, in fact.” It’s true, Jeremiah has never felt better, more alive. “Though I am sorry I worried you. You have enough on your plate at the moment without having to worry about me.”

“No more than you. Which is something I feel like I should apologise for. I’ve just kept dumping all of my Selina and work and family and other issues on you and showing up at your home in the middle of the night without really telling you why and then…” A pause. “Then… all of the other stuff.”

“I’ve done my own share of dumping and barging. Besides, we’re friends aren’t we Bruce? I was under the impression that’s what friends do. Talk to each other, listen, share secrets. Those sorts of things. And believe me, if I wasn’t interested in anything you were offering up, you would know it.”

Bruce laughs again, softer this time.

“Alright, point taken. So, ten in the morning on Tuesday then. Got it. Do you need me to bring anything?”

“No,” Jeremiah says. “I just need you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also over  here on Tumblr where I talk a lot about a certain tragic, bisexual Bat and how much I love him.


End file.
